Letter to the editor

I’m going to avoid addressing the author’s appeal to emotion logical fallacies. Instead, I’ll address some of the “facts” that are brought up in the opinion article.

I find it fascinating that there is a claim that “all the evidence” apparently supports his position when that is simply not the case. He also makes no attempt to show any of this evidence that supports his idea that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens cause more issues. I can, in fact, cite a counterexample with the city of Kennesaw, Georgia. The city made it mandatory for all homes to have a firearm. Obviously, exceptions were made for individuals with felonies or mental conditions that would prohibit them from using a firearm. According to CNN, the town has had one murder in the last six years and has a violent crime rate below 2 percent. This stands in stark contrast to the claims made by the author of the opinion.

Something else that gun control advocates like to ignore is all the evidence that demonstrates that gun control simply doesn’t work. Many cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. have some of the most strict gun control laws on the books; they also have exceptionally high numbers of homicides and violent crimes. If you were to remove these cities with strict gun laws from our nation’s statistics, the United States drops significantly in the ranking of gun deaths by country.

With over 300,000,000 guns in the hands of private citizens in this country, it would be nearly impossible to enforce any sort of nationwide gun ban. Even if you attempted a buyback program at a flat rate of $200 per firearm (an astronomically low valuation of most firearms) you’re looking at there being a cost of $60 billion to American taxpayers. That also assumes that your average gun owner is willing to turn in their firearms. That has also been demonstrated to be a dismal failure. In the aftermath of the Newtown school shooting, Connecticut passed a law requiring all “assault weapons” to be registered with the state. Only 50,000 firearms were registered which means that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens became felons overnight. This civil disobedience demonstrates what kind of colossal failure any sort of firearms confiscation would be in this country.

While I shouldn’t have to remind people, it’s worth mentioning that the first battles of our nation’s revolution, Lexington and Concord, were fought because British troops were marching on the colonists’ military supplies. In the face of tyranny, the point at which our founders decided to take up arms against their government was when they were attempting to disarm the civilians. Americans don’t have a tradition of giving up their firearms willingly.

The author of the “The Guns Remain the Same” explicitly asks you to forgo your logic at the end of their article and instead resort to emotion. I would instead ask you to use the reasoning and problem-solving skills we are supposed to be learning as students and think through the issue. It’s only then that we can have a truly educated discussion on the topic.